Ubo

11

SHE HAS OVERSLEPT and she is going to be late for school.

This one didn’t feel like all the others, and almost immediately Daniel knew that something had gone wrong.

He floated through a windy place, unmoored, the gusts battering and pushing him at random intervals, although it wasn’t his body, exactly, that was being pushed—he had no sense of his body. It was his mind, or rather, some complex of desires and fears and memories, some cluster of roots and nerves driven along the cold streams of time, surrounded by the voices of the lost, all those who had drowned in history never to be remembered.

She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.

There must have been a short in the system, a break in the connection between who he was and the dead whom the scientists had sent him to occupy, some sort of guesstimation of how that person used to be. Instead of a well-insulated trip directly into another life, he’d gone off floating through pools of personality, random bits of lives cut short, meaningless squibbles of biography.

She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.

He became aware of intimations of language, staccato rhythms and harsh vowels, not fluid like French, but simply meant to communicate, to say a thing and then leave it lying there on the table for all to see. They were the thoughts and dreams of German children, he realized, Jews and non-Jews alike struggling to make sense and stave away fear. Somehow they’d captured that, recorded that, extrapolated that, and perhaps not knowing what else to do with it the roaches had just left it lying around in their data banks, for atmosphere or insulation. It was during the war and that anxious time preceding it, that terrible war when all the rules changed.

She has overslept and she is going to be late for school. Her father is in a panic and is now speaking harshly to her, something he almost never does.

“Lazy, foolish girl, what is wrong with you? You’ve slept late again and now the entire family must pay!” And then he slaps her across the face. But she doesn’t cry out. She is too busy examining his face, trying to decide if this is some imposter who has taken her father’s place.

Her mother comes in and roughly strips her out of her bedclothes. Then her mother tries to dress her in her school uniform, but she is struggling, trying to explain to her mother that this is the wrong uniform—it is completely different from the one she is supposed to wear. But her mother speaks a different language from her and cannot understand. “Dakka dakka dakka,” her mother says. “Dakka dakka dakka.”

Her parents drag her into the school and up the stairs to her classroom. They stand in the doorway waiting for her to find her seat. The other students stare at her in her strange uniform. She says hello to several of her friends but they pretend they don’t know her. She is sure it is her strange uniform that is the problem and she tries to take it off.

“Wicked girl!” the schoolmaster shouts. “Only a sad whore takes off all her clothes!” In the doorway her parents cry out in shame.

She stops undressing, because of course the schoolmaster must be correct. She remembers that she is wearing nothing under the uniform.

Another girl is sitting in her assigned seat wearing the proper uniform. She doesn’t bother to ask her, but she knows she also has her name.

“Sit down! Sit down!” her father shouts from the doorway. “You have to find your place!” Her mother weeps and wrings her hands.

It is no use. There are no empty seats, and no one will get up to offer her one. She leaves the classroom in despair and walks out of the school with her parents.

Her family returns to their neighborhood, but when she starts up the walk to their home her father stops her. “It’s no use,” he says. “Now there’s no place for us here.”

“No, Father. It will be all right,” she says, but when she knocks on the door to their home a stranger answers. The rest of his family soon gathers behind him, gazing angrily at her.

“There must be some mistake,” she tells them. “My family and I live here.”

“No, no,” the father of the strange family tells her. “It is you who has made the mistake, Jew.”

They wander all night looking for a new place to live. Finally there is nothing more to do than to go to another neighborhood which was recently destroyed by fire. After much searching they finally find one wall still standing, and a soot-covered door in the middle of it.

She can feel her family standing behind her, anxiously waiting as she pushes and pushes on the edge of the door.

Finally it swings open, but there is nothing on the other side but wind and a distant light. “That’s all right,” she tells them. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. One by one they follow her in.

Abruptly Daniel felt himself snatched, pushed along so quickly and so far from any previous context he had no chance to gather himself. He had an odd notion of something failing, falling back and lost in the crevices between years, and then he’d landed.

Initially Daniel thought he might be playing a German schoolmaster this time, as in this mind’s idle play the most prevalent themes were discipline and pedagogy. Or perhaps he was a kind of administrator, as this was a mind filled with statistics, movements, logistics.

Die Weisen Könige wurden von einer Vereinigung von Asen abstammen und Vanir.

And a touch of madness, or at least a deep eccentricity. Irminenschaft. Wiligut had explained to Heinrich in meticulous detail how the Bible had been Germanic in its original state, how that ancient German god Krist had been stolen by the Christians for their own purposes. Wiligut claimed that German culture reached back at least as far as 228,000 BC, an idea that thrilled him and confirmed his own notions of the profound antiquity of the Aryan race.

It was simply undeniable that the inhabitants of Atlantis were Aryans who had descended from the heavens and settled on the continent. After the deluge they established a mythical city in a subterranean world below Tibet somewhere in the Himalayas.

This consciousness was flooded with these visions of color and light and dramatic gestures. The mouth became brutally dry as his excitement grew. It was the physical response to imaginative wonder typical of adolescent boys.

He had carefully filed notes from Wiligut elaborating on this buried city. He’d received the relevant letter in March, so it would be there. He could not recall the time the letter had been delivered into his hands, but that information would be noted on the front. And such a letter was significant enough that there should be a corresponding entry in his diary from that time.

In his diary he had precisely recorded everything he’d ever given anyone, how long he’d slept on any particular day, when he bathed, how many plums he ate, how many soldiers had been killed so far in this great war.

All they needed was additional proof, substantial evidence from more expeditions like the one he’d sent to Tibet. It was crucial to have something to show the Führer, something that would persuade him, and perhaps renew his hopes.

The Führer had not been the same of late. But Heinrich had hopes that this insidious deterioration in their savior would reverse itself. If not, perhaps they could persuade him to take a quieter role. Of course Heinrich was torn—his loyalty was pure—surely Hitler was ordained by the Karma of the Germanic world to lead them! Hitler was one of those brilliant figures who always appeared in Germany when it had reached a final crisis in body, mind, and soul.

But he could not bear the thought of anything lessening the reputation of their deliverer, even the Führer’s own actions.

Heinrich hoped he might persuade the Führer to see both the Germanic far past and far future as the endless unbroken stream that HeinrichHimmler—reincarnation of that pre-Christian Saxon, Henry the Fowler—had seen for himself.

“Pardon, Herr Reichsführer. Are you ill?”

In that ancient time there had been three suns and the Earth had been inhabited by giants, dwarfs, and the other creatures of legend. Truly there had been gods walking the earth in those days, and there would be again. He knew he was no god, but with the right breeding, the correct policies carried through by his SS, some day there would be.

“Reichsführer? Should I summon your doctor?”

Heinrich gazed up at the handsome blond officer and smiled faintly. He wondered if the man had fathered children. Perhaps the children, too, would be gloriously blond and handsome. If a man like that had multiple partners he might father many, many Aryan children. Heinrich would have a friendly chat with him after the speech was over. “Thank you for your concern. Dr. Kersten is in Sweden, I’m afraid. Felix cannot help me today. My stomach is bothering me, but I will be fine without his help, I assure you. I simply need a few minutes to collect my thoughts. Has the podium been inspected?” The Poznan town hall had not been his first choice for the speech—he had some security concerns. But it would do.

“Ja, Herr Reichsführer. Twice.”

“Then inspect it again.”

He should never have permitted Felix to go to Sweden. He needed him here. His belly had been much worse the past few days, and Felix’s massages were the only thing that brought him relief.

An unpleasant beer smell was in the room. Beer upset his stomach. There also seemed to be… a corpse smell. He did not know how else to describe it.

He picked up his handwritten notes off the table beside him. They were terse and informational, but they arranged themselves in his head into a kind of formula, an architecture, a prescription. He had his list of attendees—33 Obergruppenführers, 51 Gruppenführers, and eight Brigadeführers from key areas of the SS. He would acknowledge the setbacks—to do otherwise would be to undermine their trust. Then he would build their confidence, he would remind them of the inferiority of their enemies, get them to recommit themselves to the challenges ahead. He had not yet decided if he would address that other issue. It was a delicate matter, an unpleasant bit of housekeeping. But these were good men whose consciences needed to be salved.

It was for himself as much as for them—it had been a difficult year. The Tausendjahriges Reich was inevitable, but of course there would be setbacks along the way. If they could only reach some sort of agreement with the British and the Americans, then they might concentrate on the Slavs.

He gazed down at his slender, pale hands, their delicate blue veins. They’d always been too girlish, but if he kept them still they seemed to keep the rest of him calm.

He removed his pince-nez and cleaned it again. It wouldn’t do to misread a figure because of some speck on the glass. He’d had some trouble with that recently, blurred objects appearing along the edge of his field of vision, vague disturbances in the air. Perhaps these were the harbingers of some immanent vision, but probably that was too much to hope for. Although it embarrassed him, he considered that his eyes might be weakening further.

Minutes later he walked out into the hall. Something bothered him about the crowd, something that did not fit, some disturbance. Something stirred there on his left, skin paler even than his own, eyes which did not blink, as if there were no eyelids, and dark holes in the milky eyeballs where the pupils should have been. But he had a task to perform and his men were waiting. He scanned the crowd again but could find nothing more.

Daniel could tell that he was less into this part than normal, his consciousness only partially absorbed. Certainly this mind was a twitchy, uncomfortable place to be. But part of the issue, he thought, was that Himmler was so difficult to pin down exactly, his mouth always saying one thing while his mind was thinking another, and more. Himmler was like a robot with more than one program running inside.

Among the SS higher-ups in their stiff uniforms and feigned expressions of attention, a dirty young boy in striped pajamas drifted in and out between the seats, floated along the floor, insinuated his stick thick arms and legs among the chair legs and uniformed legs, pushed his twig-like fingers upwards in a reach for the sky.

Had Himmler noticed? Yes, but only vaguely. He was not yet quite ready to see.

Heinrich climbed the podium. He looked about to see who was in the high-backed chairs, how many were empty. The town hall was not as impressive as he would have liked, but at least there were the vaulted arches, a Teutonic feel to the stone work.

“In the months which have passed since we last met in June of 1942, many comrades have fallen and given their lives for Germany and for the Führer. Before them, in the forefront—I ask you to stand in their honor, and in the honor of all our dead SS men and dead German soldiers, men and women—in the forefront, from our ranks, let us honor our old comrade and friend, SS Obergruppenführer Eicke.”

They rose from their seats. Eicke had been a difficult loss for him personally. He’d taken the man out of an asylum and made him commandant at Dachau. If nothing else he would make sure Eicke was remembered as a hero. He gazed at the men assembled before him, seeking some sign of the disturbance he’d sensed earlier. There—a bit of ragged cloth, a filthy foot, but he could not see what they were attached to. His men shifted their weight impatiently. Some boy had gotten in. Someone would pay. But for now Himmler said, “I ask you to sit.”

Heinrich usually felt in control in these situations, speaking authoritatively, those he commanded hanging on to his every word. At times like these he thought of his father and all those years he’d stood in front of a classroom. His father must be proud of him, but the old man had no idea how far Heinrich might take this. No one did. He had to rid himself of that filthy intruder. A brutal bit of housekeeping was called for.

“I have considered it necessary to call you all together, the High Leadership Corps of the SS and Police, now at the beginning of the fifth year of the war, which will be a very difficult year…”

Heinrich had his fears, more than he would name. Throughout the year he had utilized his control over the courts and civil service to advance the racial reordering of Europe, paying particular attention to the fates of the 600,000 Jews he estimated to be in France. Earlier last month one thousand Jews had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz.

This Autumn there had been the Allied air raids on Hamburg in early August, followed by the destruction of the armament center of Peenemünde at mid-month. The Allies were calling for Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Some days, they seemed much further away than others from the supermen they would one day become.

Heinrich heard his own voice continue on and on, and it seemed to him he was putting parts of himself to sleep. His men continued to sit bolt upright in their chairs, but here and there he could detect some glassiness in the eyes, some strain in the necks. They would all let him down eventually, and he would become the commander of an army of corpses. They needed stirring. They needed a bit of mayhem.

But the future still lay before him. In the years ahead he would expand Wewelsberg into an SS kingdom. It would be his great city, his SS Vatican, the center of the new world. An 18-meter-high wall with 18 towers. The whole of the complex would be in the shape of a spear pointing north. Part of him focused on this and nothing else. He liked to imagine all his brave knights gathered together in the castle dining hall, sitting in their pig leather chairs and eating from silver plates with their names engraved on them. This would be just the beginning of the next phase of human evolution.

Daniel wasn’t always sure which Himmler to pay attention to—the officious accountant of the dead or the dreamer who had lost his head. Both were frightening, and equally dangerous.

“The Bolshevik system, and therefore Stalin, had made one of its most serious mistakes…”

He kept hearing a murmuring, a clanging of pots and laughter. That boy in the audience, was he causing the trouble? There—part of the boy’s face—so blue, as if the flesh had lain on frozen ground.

“… the total loss of approximately 500 km of front.

This loss required the withdrawal of the German front, in order to be able to close it again at all. This loss made the sacrifice of Stalingrad necessary from the point of view of Fate.”

There it was again. Heinrich turned. Who? Were they listening? He marked his place in the notes and stopped his speech. “Hold on. Koppe!” The men stirred anxiously. “Down there! It’s so noisy! Does a shaft lead to the kitchen?”

There were service people in the kitchen who might listen. He had to shut off the possibility.

He looked back into the audience. He didn’t see the boy. Perhaps he was still sneaking around, attempting to sabotage Heinrich’s speech? “We are going to wait for a moment,” he announced. “Because what I say isn’t for everyone’s ears, right?”

He left the microphone. His men were scattering, moving rapidly, much to his satisfaction. Now there would be action! He followed two of his staff down into the kitchen. They began to question the workers. He pulled one of his men closer, yanking on his elbow. “Are there Jews here?”

The young man looked alarmed. “Oh no, Herr Reichsführer. Everyone was checked beforehand.”

“Make sure,” he whispered. “Shoot them if necessary.”

Peering around them, Heinrich saw something on one of the counters that made him gasp: a bloody rabbit carcass, waiting patiently to be fully butchered. He shuddered, his belly twisting in knots. Vaguely, he heard one of his men explaining how they could not close the door to the kitchen, but they had found a mattress in one of the rooms. They would stuff it in front of the door.

He scurried back toward the podium, trying to leave the image of the butchered animal behind him. He had no tolerance for such things—for him a meal was ruined if he was reminded that animals had been slaughtered.

He could never understand how a hunter received pleasure from shooting an innocent creature. Every animal had a right to live. The Buddhist monks had the right idea. They carried a bell with them to keep the woodland animals away so that no harm might come to them.

He was rattled, but he went on to discuss the evacuation of Kharkov, still hearing things out in the crowd and glimpsingmovement. Why couldn’t the child at least lie still until Heinrich was finished?

“An element basic to an overall evaluation is the question of Russian population figures. That is the great riddle… 400 times 10,000 men, or 400 new divisions. I calculate this in approximately the following manner: the Russians have already drafted all men born in 1926, and some of the men born in 1927…”

The man clearly loved his dates and figures, his theories of population. But those thoughts were not music—they were like sharp rocks rolling around inside Daniel’s head. “… amount to 1.5 and 1.8 men respectively, while our men born in the same years amount to only 500,000 to 600,000 respectively, that is, that is… the subhumans …”

They took a break. It was very warm in the room, “Could someone open the windows?”

He took a few steps away. He could smell the boy—that’s what he had smelled earlier. That Jew flesh, that dead Jew flesh. He would never be able to get the smell completely scrubbed off. He should stop the speech. He should send his men out into the audience to find the dead Jew boy and drag him outside. It was the only way to be sure. But what if the boy had friends, collaborators? It was a sad thing, but Heinrich could trust no one.

He calmed himself. He began again. “America is waging a war on two fronts, even more than England: the Pacific…”

What was that? He turned his head. “What’s going on?” he asked. “America is waging…” He stopped and repeated himself again.

He fell back into his notes, his speech. He tried to keep his eyes down. But he kept looking up, and finding the boy’s eyes burning like twin stars in the shadows, hiding behind the men, his men.

“The Slav is never able to build anything himself. In the long run, he’s not capable of it… with the exception, therefore, of an Attila, a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane, a Lenin, a Stalin—the mixed race of the Slavs is based on a sub-race with a few drops of blood of our blood, blood of a leading race…”

He was disturbed to see more of the striped pajamas in the gaps between his brave Aryan men. Had the boy brought his friends? There on a pale hand, draped across the shoulder of one of his finest, a gleaming drop of blood. Heinrich was disgusted.

“It’s just as true that he is an uninhibited beast, who can torture and torment other people in ways the Devil would never permit himself to think of. It’s just as true that the Russian, high or low, is inclined to the most perverse of things, even devouring his comrades or keeping his neighbor’s liver in his lunch bag.”

Skinny arms were coming out between the seats. A paleness beyond pale. And yet his men did nothing. They simply sat there.

“It is basically wrong for us to infuse all our inoffensive soul and spirit, our good nature, and our idealism into foreign peoples.”

He could not tell even whether they were male or female. In death all Jews became the same. He was appalled when one pale sexless head placed its lips on the mouth of one of his finest…

“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest.”

At least he had attempted to be efficient.

“Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood.”

The problem was that ordinary men had no appreciation for the larger demands of history.

He read off statistic after statistic. The numbers were spell-binding, possessed of magic. He could tell that his men were uncomfortable. There was nothing more important to him than his men, his brave SS men. They all had some very difficult work to do.

“Ich will auch ein ganz schweres Kapitel will ich hier vor Ihnen in aller Offenheit nennen. I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it… It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.”

Ausrottung? Was that the word he wanted to use? Look at them—the way they all sat up, their attention renewed. Yes. Ausrottung.

“I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about—‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one party member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our program—elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew… Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

Heinrich hoped they understood the gift he was attempting to give them. A way for them to look at what he’d asked them to do, this unpleasant yet necessary task, but without guilt or blame. These were good men, SS men of fine character. Hadn’t he always been concerned about their emotional health?

Two years before while visiting Minsk he’d asked to see a shooting operation. Originally it had seemed the simplest way to handle their Jewish problem. Just shoot them. Commander Nebe arranged the execution of 98 men and two women by an einsatzgruppe unit for his benefit.

Before the execution he’d walked up to one of them. He’d asked him point blank, “Are you a Jew?”

The man had stared at him as if trying to think of a good reply. Finally he’d said “yes.”

“Are both your parents Jews?”

Again he’d replied, “yes.”

“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

The Jews had to jump into an open grave like an upside down triangle and lie face down along the apex. One or two rows of Jews would be shot, and then the next group would have to lie down on top of the dead ones in order to be shot by the soldiers standing along the grave’s edge.

He’d made the mistake of stepping right up to the edge and peering in.

After one particular shot a bit of flesh made a high arc from the ditch into the air and landed on him, some on his coat and some on his face. He could see that it was a bit of brain. He immediately felt ill and began heaving. He felt dizzy and one of the men had to lead him away. He was quite embarrassed for his men to see him this way.

Later he gave a brief speech letting them know how much he appreciated the difficult things they had to do. Unfortunately there was no help for it. They were SS men, they had to stand firm.

But almost immediately he began his search for a better way. His SS men should not have to endure such a thing. That was what had led him, finally, to the gas.

The previous Fall he had seen a gassing at Auschwitz. He had watched the selection process. Then he had stood at a small window and gazed at the Jews dying inside. He had said nothing, but there was an interesting effect. The Jews had been packed into the room with admirable efficiency—there was no wasted space. The light was very dim, so their bodies, all heights and sexes, shapes, were these soft gray pieces fitted together against a background of a darker gray with occasional patches of blue. As they began to die there was no space for them to fall, but they moved, frantically at first, but then more slowly, the patterns their bodies made one against the other changing shape, flowing, a kind of slowly moving painting that was beautiful in its way with all its shades of gray and blue.

One of the Jews looked straight at the window. Heinrich could not tell if she saw him. There was nothing in her eyes. A spot of dazzling red appeared on her lip where she had bitten herself during her final moments.

He observed the attitudes of the SS men through every step of this process. He still said nothing, but he was very concerned about their emotional well-being having to perform such a necessary but onerous task.

Finally he watched the labor crews take away the bodies for burial. He spoke up then because he had a suggestion. “You should burn the bodies instead,” he told Hoess.

Daniel forced himself into a very tiny place inside Himmler’s mind. Then he tried to make himself go to sleep.

“We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve.”

Some in his SS would let their personal greed make a travesty of his own code of ethics. The anger built in Heinrich until the internal volume of his moral outrage shook Daniel from his little hiding place.

Heinrich began to explain the punishment that would be delivered, and by the end of that explanation he was growling. “He who takes even one Reich Mark of it, that’s his death! A number of SS Men—not very many—have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own Folk, to kill this Folk which wanted to kill us. But we don’t have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else!”

Himmler seemed to blink more than the average person, or perhaps Daniel was simply intensely aware of it. Between the blinks Daniel saw the Jews in the audience moving again, but whether to get closer to Himmler and the podium or to make their own escape he could not tell.

“Again and again we have sifted out and cast aside what was worthless, what did not suit us. Just as long as we have strength to do this will this organization remain healthy. The moment we forget the law which is the foundation of our race, and the law of selection and austerity towards ourselves, we shall have the germ of death in us, and will perish…”

Heinrich could feel them slipping away. What would become of him if he lost his command?

“We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our boys with the laws of the SS-organization. I consider it to be absolutely necessary to the life of our peoples, that we should not only impart the meaning of ancestry, grandchildren and future, but feel these to be a part of our being. Without there being any talk about it, without our needing to make use of rewards and similar material things, it must be a matter of course that we have children. It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial super-stratum of the Germanic people.”

Heinrich had spent his childhood staring up at the stone castle at Burg Trusnitiz on the high hill. He’d fantasized about a brotherhood of Teutonic knights who gave their blood defending the sacred soil of their homeland from invaders who had no notion of the necessity for honor, duty, and purity. Now he had his own brotherhood of dark knights who he hoped might one day thrill the world with their power. Without his SS he would be less than nothing.

“We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first SS-men of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before us. Now let us remember the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.

“Our Führer Adolf Hitler.

“Sieg Heil!

“Sieg Heil!

“Sieg Heil!”

They all stood, saluting. Heinrich could see how the ragged child who had first intruded upon his speech now lay beneath their polished boots, falling into bits too fine, he hoped, for history to hold them.

It was the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.

And deep inside, Daniel prayed let me out let me out let me out.